HeavyJob:
Instant Feedback for all Projects.

P.J. Hoerr, Inc. Founded: 1914 Operations Manager: Jeff Fuerst Work Type: Highway/Road Builder Division Size: $10 Million Number of Projects Annually: 25-35 Location: Peoria, IL

"Guys with relatively no computer experience at all are now sending daily time card data via e-mails instead of driving long distances to deliver paper time sheets back to our main office," says Jeff Fuerst, Operations Manager at P.J. Hoerr, Inc. "In addition to being easy to use for anyone, the thing we like best about HeavyJob is the 'instant feedback' we get for all of our projects," he continued. The benefit of this kind of daily reporting is obvious. If you have a problem you know about it in a timely manner so it can be fixed before it's too late. With P.J. Hoerr's old method of job tracking it would take two or three weeks to get the cost information needed for job analysis back from accounting to realize there was a problem. "That's the biggest thing for us," says Fuerst. "We see HeavyJob paying dividends for us every day."

An example of a project in which HeavyJob played a critical role is the Rehabilitation of an Existing Bridge for the City of Peoria. The bridge was on the Historical Register so it had to be taken out and put back exactly the way it was. "We required the field superintendent, who's mainly a hands-on guy, to measure and report daily quantities. A lot of the quantities were overlapping, especially some of the repair items, so it was a very difficult task he undertook to keep all that information straight. But by putting it into the system he was able to do it. The time breakdown in HeavyJob is so simple; the productivity goes in the same column with the time. Literally, as soon as I got the file back I could tell where we were at," says Fuerst. "That feedback to the foreman is instantaneous too. Once he's done with his time, he's entered his material and truck tickets and things like that, he's able to run the cost analysis report, right on the diary screen and tell how he's doing. It became a mission between the two of us to beat the budget. This was a fellow who had very limited skills when it came to record keeping and things like that. He's a great construction guy, but didn't have what you would expect it would take to get this done. However, he would look at the daily reports and every day was like a hurdle and every day he had to climb a little higher and a little higher. He just kept doing it. He was on a mission to beat that budget."

P.J. Hoerr's tracking system works pretty simply. The foreman in the field enters his time and production, which he needs to do anyway. It is sent in to the project manager via e-mail with a text file attached. The whole days time can be imported in about 30 seconds. The project manager then reviews it and consolidates the information, checking to make sure no one has over 8 hours in a day's time since they work in a union environment. The file is then sent to payroll. "I can have a day's payroll done in 20 minutes," reports Fuerst. P.J. Hoerr does time on a daily basis and exports it from HeavyJob/Manager to their Bidtek accounting package. "It's a relatively short process to send 10 or 15 jobs worth of information with 10 or 15 guys on each job. Our accounting people were actually a little leery of it at first because they liked having the control of being the last person to touch the time. The way it's entered now, through the Field system, the last person to actually do any typing or data entry is the foreman in the field. You've literally had all of your entry into payroll done by your foreman in the field. It pays back in dividends exponentially, because just a small return on labor is huge in your bottom line," concludes Fuerst.